So here’s how trash and deliveries will be handled in bigger parks:
A new “Deliveries” building will replace the current crate and trash stacking tiles. It can be connected through pneumatic tubes and conveyor belts to “Depots” that can be placed throughout the park. Shops can be associated with a Depot; if they are, crates will automatically travel to that Depot, from where they then get picked up by Haulers and manually transported the final meters to the shop instead of all the way from the crate stack. Inversely, trash can be dropped off at a depot and then gets automatically pumped to the Deliveries building.
This might sound weird and unrealistic at first, but at least the Disney parks are known to really use a trash disposal system that operates like this (AVAC)!
I’m not aware of a park that uses an automated system for transporting goods, but there are warehouses and airports that operate huge conveyor belt systems like that, so it’s not entirely unrealistic at least - and it should be fun and makes sense for gameplay reasons to have this, so we’re taking that small liberty here.
So far I’ve got the tube/conveyor building working (it works like building paths).
Luuk continued with the scenario editor and made progress with creating tools for defining the owned park area:
Tim added tracking of shop and attraction revenue:
Still lots to do to get all of this operational! Usually we break work down into much smaller tasks that don’t all necessarily have to be completed at once, so even if some tasks aren’t done in time for the monthly alpha update we can ship whatever is ready at that point and it’ll still work… but with these things either the whole system is complete or the entire feature needs to get delayed.
We have a couple weeks left to make it happen but it still makes me a bit nervous…we’ll see!